SOLUTIONS TO CRIME IN BLACK AMERICA PART II

Solutions to Crime in Black America Part II

(Please scroll down, if you’d like to see the two previous blogs on this issue)

Standards-for teachers and students- must be raised, not lowered.  We now have English teachers who cannot conjugate, and high school graduates who cannot tell the difference between a verb and an adjective.  This may sound a bit trivial, but I believe that words are the clothes we put on our ideas.  The more elegant the clothing, the more elegant the ideas. The more disciplined the language, the more disciplined the thinking; and we need more discipline in any incarnation we can get it.

Much of our underclass does not understand the value or true nature of education.  I remember shortly after graduating from college telling a woman that I was working in textbook publishing.  She responded that the factory was hiring.  She knew I had a degree, but saw no relationship between that degree and the type of work I was doing.  On a higher level, our kids need to know that the education they receive in schools is there to prepare them to continue educating themselves throughout the rest of their lives.  Most of all, they need to know that it is really cool to be smart!

Another fundamental issue with the underclass and education lies in the fact that the underclass- as do all marginalized people- lives in the moment- from crisis to crisis.  While working in Child Welfare, I received calls from frantic parents whose heating gas had been turned off, desperately trying to get the gas back on because the temperature was supposed to drop THAT DAY.  In many cases, the gas may have been off for months.  They knew that winter was coming, but did nothing until the freezing temperatures were upon them.   It is extremely difficult for people who function like this to attend to their children’s educational needs that won’t pay dividends for years to come.

Governmental bureaucracies must be pressured to open up to new ideas and approaches.  Several years ago I put together what I still believe to be a powerful program for empowering parents and children.  The program was called SPEAK (Serious Parents Empowering Achieving Kids).    The Chicago Housing Authority was emptying its public housing and needed programs for helping residents integrating the world outside the projects.   I spent four years trying to get my program considered by the CHA as well as the IDCFS (Illinois Department of Children and Family Services) where I had previously worked, to no avail.  No one even saw it. This isn’t a personal lament.  I’m not the only original thinker out here, and these problems require creativity that the system precludes.

Next we come to the 800 lb. gorilla: the Black church.  The only institution that is completely owned and operated by the African American community, the church represents enormous potential in this fight.  I would need a couple hundred pages to fully explicate the role of religion and the institution itself in this matter, so what I’m writing here will be spectacularly cursory.

Back in the 1980’s, I delivered a paper before AHSA (African Heritage Studies Association, a prestigious African American think tank, founded by Dr. John Henri Clarke, whose members/ participants have included everyone from Maulana Karenga to Barbara Sizemore to Dr. Joseph Ben Jochannan, to Ivan Van Sertima) entitled The Black Church, Cultural Nationalism, and The Prevention of Crime Among Americans of African Descent.  Wildly oversimplified, the basic premise of the paper was that people act in accordance with their sense of identity, or how they see themselves.  (For example, criminals view themselves as predators and act as such).  Churches inadvertently provide a sense of identity (Who are you?  I’m a Christian).   By utilizing cultural nationalism as a tool, churches could extend their sphere of influence beyond the borders of their memberships, and impact on negative behavior in the community by helping people define themselves in positive ways. 

We must understand that all religion is intrinsically political.  African American church leaders, from Richard Allen, Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond lead the fight for just and equality from the abolition of slavery to Civil Rights and beyond.  Conversely, White preachers traveled from plantation to plantation preaching to slaves to make them docile.  They quoted Ephesians 6:5-9 and Timothy 6:1-2 among other texts to justify slavery.  The same tactics were used to subjugate the serfs in feudal Europe.  The fact that slaves had rights and were still regarded as human beings until the peculiar institution of American slavery always got left out.

Ministry students study the history of the church extensively.  They cannot lead that which they do not understand.  Yet many African American ministers are clueless when it comes to the history of their own people!  Make sense?

Jesus was of a people who could be mistaken for Egyptians a la Moses.  Yet the most popular images of Him are of a blond blue eyed European.  Between these images, and Black folks constantly singing about wanting to be washed as white as snow, I’d say we have a problem.  I could go on and on, but I’d need a 500 page tome to fully express this issue.

I’m proposing that quality of life councils, or committees be established in areas where crime is an issue.   They would consist of members of the various communities that could impact the issue: education, law enforcement, judicial, social services, and others.  Resources and ideas could be shared.  This is, by no means, a panacea.  But it is a start.  And we’ve   got to do something.

.